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Google Business Profile and local SEO

Your Google Business Profile decides more of your local visibility than your website does, and most of it comes down to settings you can change yourself in an afternoon. This category covers the levers that genuinely move the map pack, starting with categories, and it is equally clear about the work that has been ritual for years without evidence behind it. It also covers what to do when things go wrong: a suspension, a fake competitor listing, a move to a new address. After reading it you should know which of your own settings is costing you position, and how long a real change takes to show.

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All twenty articles on Google Business Profile and local SEO

In reading order rather than by date. 20 published so far, and the rest are written and scheduled. Titles without a link are not live yet.

  1. Google Business Profile categories: the single strongest lever you control

    Your primary category is the setting that decides which searches your business is eligible to appear in at all.

  2. How to pick your primary category when several fit

    Pick the category that matches the search you most want to win, not the one describing the largest share of your revenue.

  3. What your competitors' categories reveal, and how to find them

    Your competitors' primary categories are visible in Google Maps under each business name, and their secondary categories can be pulled from the page source of the Maps result.

  4. Google Business Profile posts: what they do and do not affect

    Posts are a merchandising surface, not a ranking lever. They put an offer, an event, or an update in front of someone already looking at your listing, which affects whether that person.

  5. The local pack explained for people who do not work in SEO

    The local pack is the block of three businesses with a map that Google shows above the ordinary links when a search looks local.

  6. Why you rank in one part of town and not another

    Local rankings are calculated from where the searcher is standing, not from where your business sits.

  7. Grid rank tracking: why one ranking number is misleading

    Grid rank tracking runs the same local search from many simulated points laid out across your service area and records your position at each one.

  8. NAP consistency and whether it still matters in 2026

    NAP means name, address, phone, and NAP consistency means those three details read the same everywhere they appear online.

  9. Citation building: what is worth doing and what is theatre

    A citation is any online mention of your business name, address, and phone number, whether on a directory, a chamber of commerce page, or a local news site.

  10. How to report a competitor with a keyword-stuffed business name

    Use the "Suggest an edit" option on the competitor's listing to change their name to the one on their signage, and submit a Business Redressal Complaint Form if the edit is rejected or.

  11. Fake listings in your map pack and how to get them removed

    Fake listings come down through Google's Business Redressal Complaint Form or the public edit flow, not through anything inside your own profile.

  12. Service area businesses: how to rank without a storefront

    A service area business hides its address and lists the towns it serves, but it still ranks from the hidden pin, not from the middle of that list.

  13. Google Business Profile Q&A and how to seed it properly

    The Q&A section on your profile is public, and anyone can answer a question about your business, including people who have never been there.

  14. Adding services and products to your profile, correctly

    Services and products are two different sections with two different jobs.

  15. Business hours, holiday hours, and the ranking cost of getting them wrong

    Wrong hours remove you from the results that convert best. Whether you are open at the moment of the search is now a scored local ranking factor, so a profile that says closed at 6pm.

  16. Suspended Google Business Profile: how reinstatement actually works

    Reinstatement works in one order: find the violation, fix it, then appeal with evidence.

  17. Moving locations without losing your local rankings

    Edit the address on your existing profile. Never create a new listing, because a new listing starts with no reviews and no history, and the two together are most of what you have built.

  18. What a monthly local SEO report should actually tell you

    A useful monthly report answers four questions: how many people contacted you, where you rank across your service area for the terms that matter, how your review flow compares to your.

  19. Local landing pages: how many, and when they start hurting

    Build a page for a town only when you have something true and specific to say about working there.

  20. How long local SEO takes before anything visibly changes

    Profile changes can register within days. Ranking movement from those changes usually takes weeks.

Be honest with yourself

When this category is not your problem

If you do not serve customers at a place or travel to them, the map pack is not where your customers are and none of this will help. An online-only business competes on different ground.

And if your profile is already complete, correctly categorized, and ranking in the pack for the terms that matter, stop here. Further profile work has a low ceiling, and your next gain is almost certainly on the website or in reviews.

Where to go next

Send your business name and the town you want to rank in to eric@seod.com and I will tell you what your primary category is set to, what the businesses above you are using, and whether that gap explains your position. It takes me a few minutes and you do not need to book anything.

Everything above is one job rather than six, which is how Search visibility runs it: the profile, citations and NAP, the on-page fixes, and weekly reporting on position and calls.

Call Eric Email Eric